Dear Gun Controllers: Pharmaceutical Drugs Kill More People than Bullets

The hype has it that gun violence is so epidemic, it has left a trail of death so vast, only broad restrictions on legal gun ownership and limits on magazine rounds could possibly end it.

Forget the fact that the crime stats in this country don’t support this assertion. Also forget the fact that crimes are perpetrated by criminals, and it follows that criminals are such because they do not follow laws…no matter how many new ones are passed each year.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 31,672 people died from firearm injuries in America in 2010. While that sounds like a lot, it should be noted that the majority — 61.2% — were suicides, not mass shootings or individual murders.

A group of cyclists calling themselves “Team 26&Prime in honor of the Sandy Hook victims just finished riding from Newtown, Connecticut to Capitol Hill to “send a message to Congress to strengthen gun-control laws to prevent more tragedies like the one in Sandy Hook from happening again,” according to the Washington Post. A big deal was made about this in the press. But who is riding around in honor of all the people dying from accidental prescription drug overdoses or adverse reactions to legal medications?

A lot more than 26 people need to get on a bike, because although 11,078 people were murdered with guns in 2010, the CDC has also reported that drug overdoses were actually the leading cause of injury death that year.

In fact, of the 38,329 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2010, 30,006 — a whopping 78% — were unintentional. Accidental. Not on purpose.

Those figures are a lot nicer than the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA). The agency estimates that adverse reactions to legal prescription medications kill approximately 100,000 people each and every year.

A study released just last year shows that the majority of the country is taking one prescription or another; some 70% of the country is now legally medicated, and 13% of Americans are on antidepressants.

So if anything needs more regulation in this country, it would appear to be doctors handing out prescriptions to people like candy without sufficient education and warning, not lawful gun owners.

Where are all the pharmaceutical control advocates? The mainstream media never seems to talk about them…